Local residents took a trip into the past last week at the Stony Clove Rod and Gun Club in the hamlet of Lanesville as the Town of Hunter kicked off five public discussions aimed at enriching a map to chart the mountaintop’s history prior to 1950.
The map, made possible through two grants, has been in the works since the library developed a committee to collect and organize data. It stems from years of questions about the area’s history, said Town Historian Diann Terns-Thorpe, who is spearheading the effort along with Mountain Top Library Director Jaki Elmo.
“I am so excited about it,” Terns-Thorpe said in an interview. “There’s never really been a simple way to look and see what was here.”
Despite the hamlet’s remoteness today, Lanesville, close to the Shandaken hamlet of Chichester, once functioned as an important stop along the Ulster & Delaware Railroad, which shut down in 1954. State Route 214 between Chichester and Hunter once held five post offices, Terns-Thorpe said.
“If it wasn’t for the train coming through here over the hill we would have nothing,” said Lanesville Fire Chief Edwin Benjamin, who attended the session Friday at the club, whose walls were adorned with a half-dozen taxidermied deer mounts and one ring-necked pheasant.
The next session is at the Hunter Public Library at 7 p.m. on Friday. The others will be held at the Elka Park and Platte Clove Methodist Church on June 26, at the Haines Falls Firehouse on July 10 and at the Mountain Top Library on July 24.
Greene County GIS Director Owen Nachtigal will eventually combine the data collected into a cohesive map.
Elmo said it’s important that the library reach out to residents of the town’s smaller hamlets.
“We got to a place where we feel like we have a lot of locations, we’re probably close,” she said. “So we’d like to just go and visit each area in a municipal or community space to say ‘Hi,’ if they haven’t had an opportunity to give any input. Just because they’re not on the committee doesn’t mean they don’t get a say on what the map looks like.”
The map, which will appear only in print, will have a “roadmap feel,” Elmo said.
“We’re going to try to make it feel contemporary, about the turn of the century,” she said. “On the back, we’ll have little descriptions of the locations, and we would like to have unique shots of the area that aren’t widely circulated already, maybe some fun facts. It’s going to be based on how big the map actually does have to be, that kind of dictates how much you can add.”
Elmo said she hopes locals attend the next sessions to provide input. She aims to print enough maps to supply the community, and potentially get them placed in mailboxes.
“We just feel like this map belongs to everybody, so we want to hear what you know,” she said. “Now is an opportunity to really share what you know, to show what’s special about this place.”
Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter and surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.
